ABSTRACTION AND A MNEMONIC TRICK

It has been ten years since our ‘double’ lives of India/America began. I want to describe my dual-life of US/India but when I am tired and jet lagged, it is very hard for me to focus on my delight –detail -- and feel inclined towards abstractions, a general description of the geography of my soul. I think it is a natural tendency in tired moments and in aging to move towards greater abstraction, the kind that is the source from which we are born into so much concrete specificity. It why the brain tends to forget to pay attention to the essential details in the business of  living, and I misplace things and spend hours trying to find them. I have come up with a method that works for me.

When I put something somewhere consciously (this is the hard part! Generally we do things blindly, unconsciously) I do a mental repeat, and say to myself, remember, you have put this here. And whenever I do this, I have no problem locating things. I have also taken to making, in addition to mental notes, lists of where I put essential items like keys, sim cards, etc before I leave one life for the other. In the six months away from one life, I happily forget everything about it. It is only when I return to it that the things that were of no importance whatsoever, suddenly assume an alarming relevance. 

THE SPIDER THAT GOT IT AND GOT AWAY

My encounter with the cockroach reminds me about my encounter with another spider last year. I am not afraid of them, unlike a friend of mine who had to have therapy for it, which didn’t help. I even love them, for they are, like me, weavers and spinners. I have a deep respect for them.

But in our home in the Kullu valley there is a variety that gets huge. Spread out your hand and imagine your fingers extended another inch, and you have its size. They are black and when you see one, it does instill a certain fear and horror though I am told by locals that they are harmless.

Once when I walked into the bedroom there was one, sitting smack in the middle of my pillow, like a big black flower. Now, though I respect them as a metaphor, this I could not tolerate so I screamed for Payson to help. He came up from his studio grumblingly (he was in the middle of something) and threw a towel on it to catch and release it outside the window. But he must have grasped it too hard, so its yellow juice blood splattered on the side of the bed. I felt really sorry for it, as did Payson.

But then one day while Payson was away hiking, I awoke to another huge one in the room, sitting without stirring (spiders know how to do that) on the wall near the window like a lovely flower, except, of course, it was a spider, and too close and too big for comfort. I was paralyzed with fear for a long time, perhaps ten minutes, approaching it with a towel, then returning and standing still. I had drawn aside the curtains and opened the window before approaching it with a towel, but though I went to grasp it many times, I always withdrew with dread. The paralysis was caused by two conflicting thoughts and emotions (emotion precedes thought but at some time they become inseparable): One voice said, be brave, courageous, overcome your fears, go on, do it. The other voice wondered in its (what I thought was) cowardice whether it wouldn’t just go away if I ignored it, re-hide in one of the crevices in the room. But even as I so wondered I knew that this option would not produce ease and peace of mind.

As I stood there the spider stirred and aroused the old fear. What if it moves away, and what if, oh horror (and this is the fear) it moves towards me, jumps on me, latches itself to my face, my breast, my bare skin, etc, etc. But it moved away in that quick and stealthy way that they have, and I couldn’t see him, and I breathed a sigh of relief, sort of, till I saw that he had moved behind Payson’s marvelous sculpture of Buddha, all curled up at its base. I removed Buddha’s head, then the body, and tried once more to approach and remove it, when it deftly moved towards the open window and out it went.

I shut the window, amazed at the turn of events. He was a sentient creature entirely cognizant of my consciousness. There was a mind-link with it. I didn’t want to hurt it but nor did I want it to bite me. He didn’t want to harm or be killed either, simply to live and be in peace. He took refuse in the pedestal of the Buddha, as have I, many times. He read my thoughts and escaped.  

I didn’t have to be ‘brave,’ grab him and put him out, with all the consequent ego stroking at having been ‘courageous.’ All I did was have the presence of mind to open the window and the solution presented itself to both of us.

KILLING SPIDERS

I am still on the topic of killing, as you can see. Let me tell you what happened on my last birthday. I was very conscious that it was the day my mother gave birth to me, and said so to her on the phone, that my birthday is also her birthday. When I went upstairs to the bathroom to take my bath in our home in the Kullu Valley, one of those huge spiders so common here, was huddled in the corner of the bathing area, a large white, circular pad beneath her body, giving birth to hundreds of spiders all around her. After much hesitation I grabbed her (gently) with my old underwear and put her out of the window, then proceeded to flush down her babies with hot, scalding water, aware that unless I did so, the bathroom would be teeming with huge spiders a little later on in the season. So, my birthday began with birth cum death day for the spiders.    

KILLING A COCKROACH AND THE POWER OF PRAYER.

I begin with some killing.

I have always had a horror of cockroaches. I remember last year when I came to visit my mother in Chandigarh she had had poison poured into the drains of the bathroom before I arrived so they would all be dead, but the deadliest poison takes them days if not weeks to die. When I arrived they started crawling out of the  drain holes from the bathroom, huge ones , half the size of my palm, and invaded my room, crawling into my hand bag, into the rolled up yoga mat, and just about everywhere else. I would estimate a count of forty humungous ones. I was the proverbial female standing on her bed and screaming till my mother’s cook came with a broom to beat them to death. The hardest part to watch this was the ones that gave him chase and escaped to God knew what location to appear and frighten me all over again.

A few nights ago I went to the bathroom, intending to return to bed and a peaceful sleep, but O horror, there was a cockroach right by my pillow. There was no standing on the bed and shouting out to anyone, it was the middle of the night. I had to deal with it myself. I picked up the other pillow and threw it on him and a la Amour (if you have seen the movie) put all my pressure on it, hoping to smother it to death. I just stood with my weight on the pillow for a long time, absolutely paralyzed with fear. What next? What if he wasn’t dead? What if he was dead? How would I pick him up?

So, both my hands pressing down on the pillow, I prayed and asked for strength to deal with this (for me) crisis. I did a lot of self-talk, telling myself it is only a cockroach, that it is as afraid, if not more, of me than I it. The prayer helped. I knew I would deal with whatever arose. When I finally relaxed the pressure, and lifted the pillow, there was nothing there. There! I said, I only imagined it. But when I shook out the quilt, there it was, on the floor, and I went at it with my sandal. It gave me quite a chase, but I was as determined to get it as he was to escape.  Finally I gave him some solid whacks with the sole and then smushed it to a pulp. I knew I had to mop up the operation myself. I disposed off the squishy mess of pulped wings, legs, antennae and bloodless insect goop with a tissue and flushed it down the toilet.

I am certain the feeling is no different from when one kills a human being, for instance, in defense. Killing is killing though there are degrees of it.  Everything one kills is sentient. And I feel everything communicates with us. We are they. We share the same DNA. As Narby says, “Molecular biology revealed that the basic mechanisms of life are identical for all species. The petals of a rose, Francis Crick’s brain, and the coat of a virus are all built out of proteins made up of exactly the same 20 amino acids. DNA and its duplication mechanisms are the same for all living creatures. The only thing that changes from one species to another is the order of the letters.”

I have to admit I had a sense of triumph and satisfaction as I stood above his remains. Though I still dislike them, I have no fear of them. I have killed two more since, with the same sense of challenge and sport.

The point of this is that sometimes killing becomes necessary (I realize what a slippery slope this assertion is), and Prayer rallies all ones courage and energies.    

GOODBYE FOR NOW

I will not have internet for several weeks, perhaps even a month as I head to India tomorrow. Thanks for reading this blog!

AN ADVANTAGE OF GROWING OLD

There are many, but I one I want to mention briefly is having the time and patience to read all those wonderfully difficult books and authors one didn't have the energy and patience for in youth.

GLORIOUS LAZINESS

There is so much to do today, and I won't burden myself by mentioning the long list. Oh, well, just a few, simply to delight in detail. Besides, detail is a wonderful dimension and small openings lead to it. Much of this doing is not about packing up for 7 months away from one of your homes, for that, compared to a ton of clerical, mental, miniscule tasks I have to perform about coming up with a good proposal for the book I have just completed THE SINGING GURU (I couldn't have done it without Payson, who spent about 24 hours in the last two days to help me with a large section of it) is almost a delight;  I'm enjoying thinking about which books to take, for they are a large part of my enjoyment of life. I can do without fancy food, eat stale bread with water (thought I haven't done this!) but have a good book to read, the kind I can sink my mental teeth into, taste, savor with the tongue of my mind, and savor it insatiably and without thought of calories. I love books that challenge my thinking and require attention. I'm going to take Gertrude Stein's LECTURES IN AMERICA simply because her style can be so unfriendly to a linear and clear way of reading, because she is like a babbler who makes so much bloody sense; I'm taking THE MEANING OF THE BODY, Aesthetics of Human Understanding, by Mark Johnson -- because I read a few pages and loved the way it is opening up my eyes to myself. There are many others, but I think I am tiring of details and must return to the subject of laziness. 

My definition of laziness today: all I want to do is putter from activity to activity, for active I must be today, none of which has anything to do what i ought to do (though I have only today left)  here, doing some what I call geriatric yoga, which means slow, slow, long stretches, and in between, doing the Shava (corpse asana), writing here, and nurture the garden a bit before I go. 

Yes, I enjoy writing here, even more than in my journal, because all my life I have avoided wanting an audience in my preferences for solitary privacy. But now something has changed. I think it is the sweetness of knowing that my privacy is shared by others. It is connection. It is commitment. It is establishing a bond. 

And it is business. I want to put out the word of my wonderful new book, THE SINGING GURU, Legends of Guru Nanak, Founder of the Sikhs. 

In a way I have prepared for this book all my life.